Global Learning XPRIZE: Call For Teams!

As many of my regular readers will know, I joined the XPRIZE Foundation last year. At XPRIZE we run large competitions that incentivize the solution of some of the grandest challenges that face humanity.

My role at XPRIZE is to create a global community that can practically change the world via XPRIZE, inside and outside of these competitions. You will be reading more about this in the coming months.

Back in September we launched the Global Learning XPRIZE. This is a $15 million competition that has the ability to impact over 250 million kids. From the website:

The Global Learning XPRIZE challenges teams from around the world to develop open source and scalable software that will enable children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic within the 18 month period of competition field testing. Our goal is an empowered generation that will positively impact their communities, countries and the world.

Many of my readers here are Open Source folks, and this prize is an enormous Open Source opportunity. Here we can not only change the world, but we can create Open Source technology that is at the core of this revolution in education.

Not only that, but a key goal we have with the competition is to encourage teams and other contributors to collaborate around common areas of interest. Think about collaboration around storytelling platforms, power management, design, voice recognition, and more. We will be encouraging this collaboration openly on our forum and in GitHub.

Call For Teams

Since we launched the prize, we have seen an awesome number of teams registering to participate. Our view though is that the more teams the better…it creates a stronger environment of collaboration and competition. We want more though!

As such, I want to encourage you all to consider joining up as a team. We recommend people form diverse teams of developers, designers, artists, scientists, and more to feed into and explore how we build software that can automate the teaching of literacy. Just think about the impact that this software could have on the world, and also how interesting a technical and interaction challenge this is.